LIFE AND VALUES

Terry LintonCHICAGO TRIBUNE

This is a response to the letter headlined ''Warped values'' which appeared in the Nov. 10 issue of The Chicago Tribune. The author`s premise was that our values suffer from inconsistency, citing the following example: Two whales trapped in ice off the Alaskan coast are saved through the extensive efforts of various well-wishers, while a brain-dead patient in Rhode Island is allowed to die when a court rules her feeding tube can be removed.

Mary Anne Hackett, president of the Illinois Right to Life Committee, wrote: ''Clearly our national priorities are grotesquely inverted when we mount an Operation Rescue for two obscure nonhuman animals while ignoring the scores of patients who are being ordered to death by starvation.''

I fully agree! First, it is true we were trying to rescue obscure animals. (I hesitate to use the word nonhuman because the intellectual attributes which separate us from animals are nonexistent in a brain-dead patient anyway). Of course, the reason these animals are obscure is because we have hunted them to near extinction.

This is where I agree with Ms. Hackett`s statement. Why are we spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to save two whales when no parallel effort is made to keep those same whales from being harpooned the moment they reach open water?

I also agree we should be consistent in our values. If two whales drown in the Arctic, it is a natural event, as natural as the uninterrupted development of a fetus which may otherwise have been aborted. So why, Ms. Hackett, do you imply a person who cannot feed herself, much less think or feel, should have her bodily flesh sustained like some culture in a petrie dish?

Finally, on what ethics does your organization base its values? If God intended man not to interfere with the natural process of birth, what about the natural process of death? I can also explain what ethics lie behind those values which you labeled ''warped.'' In both the cases of the whales and the Rhode Island patient a single, quite consistent value was at work. It is often referred to as the act of being ''humane.''